Terri-Nichelle Bradley started the Brown Toy Box to give Black children the ability to see their worlds differently. Brown Toy Box produces children's products and experiences that are designed to encourage and prepare Black children to pursue STEAM interests and careers. The company's curated STEAM-themed activities and programs help Black children widen their ideas of what's possible for their futures and inspire them to believe they can succeed in pursuing these careers as adults.

While Covid-19 has seen many businesses close, Bradley has noticed a massive shift in her company. She not only seen the direct-to-consumer part of the business thrive, but she has also seen an uptick in the B2B side, which works with schools and youth-serving organizations that are primarily Title I schools in high poverty, 85 percent Black communities. "What I knew for certain when school was interrupted so abruptly was that a lot of those kids were never going to get online. Even if they were given a laptop and hotspot, they still weren't going to get online because whose second grader is getting on a class Zoom at 10 o'clock if the mama is still at work as an essential employee?"

“Does your engineering team really respect you?” an investor asked Daniela Braga when she first came into pitch her artificial intelligence data startup, DefinedCrowd. “Because you’re not quite an engineer.” As a matter of fact, Daniela Braga has a PhD in engineering; she also has a Masters in linguistics—although the latter was hardly a prerequisite to detect the condescension in the venture capitalist’s tone.

While it may have been true that she never worked as a software engineer, she had a feeling his skepticism had more to do with her being a woman. She laughed him off, as she has other doubters. Today DefinedCrowd sells machine learning training data to tech companies and AI specialists all over the world. Braga’s strength as a manager, she says, derives in part from the fact that she has deep technical knowledge of a subject herself (in her case, natural language processing). That expertise gives her the confidence to appreciate and communicate with experts in other fields—and the resilience to brush off shallow types who might judge her superficially, like the investor.

Her advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs: Master one subject better than anyone in the world — and use that as your cornerstone as you scale your business. “Get something very right in your career, and build from there,” she says. “It gives you a whole new level of confidence moving forward.” – Burt Helm